I‘ve spent the last few months having back and forth discussions about reviewing books, and have come to the conclusion that the conversation frustrates me. Not because I don’t enjoy it or it’s not interesting to me, but because it always, invariably, becomes a discussion on craft from my part. Which means I’m going to be spending the next couple of hours being a nerd over the nuances that most people just don’t care for.
It’s very, very easy to have an opinion on the material you consume. And that’s all right. Those are your feelings. Those are always valid.
But when you have to break things apart in order to talk about them to judge them…it becomes a bit complex. Convoluted, even. One of the things we’ve talked about privately in our writing group is how the only way to be truly objective about reviewing and minimize the influence of your biases is if you are willing to talk about craft. You have to understand what the author set out to do, and then be able to discuss what they did or didn’t accomplish based on the material you’re looking at. The first part is key, and goes beyond genre and sub-genre, because it defines the benchmarks on which you can proceed to judge the material.
Because otherwise, every single score becomes arbitrary. It’s like judging a bridge without knowing the basics about engineering and not knowing why the bridge needed to be built in the first place. Yes, on surface, you can tell me why it’s an eyesore and have an opinion about where taxpayer money should’ve gone, but why it’s here and not there, why it’s longer on that side, why it’s so many lanes…try to have that same conversation with a bridge engineer.
I did a bunch of mini-reviews yesterday and realized there was no possible way I could rank them against each other. The books I enjoyed, I enjoyed for very different reasons. The question, “Which one is better?” leaves me with a feeling of sunken dread. Nothing is “better.” My own favourite books have flaws, and I wouldn’t recommend them to just anyone. Which is why if you hear me rave about books, you’d think I didn’t understand the basics. I’m either telling you how much I loved something or getting ready to have a very, very serious discussion.
I’ve tried to score my own books based on what I feel about them and the answers change depending on my mood. I can only see what a nightmare it would be to try to judge other people’s, at least without the technical stuff to back it up and an actual, critical reading of the book in question (so enjoyment readings can go out of the window for that!). And the technical stuff needs to be considered thoroughly, not just what I feel about the plot or characters at any given point in time. One particular favourite topic of mine is pacing. “It’s too slow,” people might say, and that’s something that would work against one of my favourite reads this year, The Golem and the Jinni. Yet it’s a character piece, so it’s SUPPOSED to be slow. Uprooted was way more fast-paced, which you think would be a good thing, but I felt made it less better than it could’ve been.
And still it’s arbitrary. Could I rate Blackwood Marauders low on “worldbuilding” because it isn’t rich on culture or exploration, when the whole point of the story was to lie low? I limited my word count on The Wolf of Oren-yaro because I wanted an easier introduction to the plot. Which is there. It’s huge. But that’s not what I was trying to write about. Would a larger book then be better because it has more? Or worse because it HAS more, and it tried too much?
Shades of grey, everywhere. Which is why I tell people, over and over again, that my ratings are bullshit. If I review things, I’ll always go on and on about some technical detail or another. My star ratings reflect the author’s attempt and is ranked only against themselves. A 3-star from one author is not the same as a 3-star for another author. And I still find it ridiculous. Yesterday’s exercise made this all too clear for me.
I don’t even know, given all of this, if writing books really is the harder thing after all…
